Review/Art; The Burden of Isolation, In Baselitz 'Hero' Paintings

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: March 30, 1990

The West German painter Georg Baselitz gained fame in the United States in the early 1980's for his strident paintings of inverted figures, canvases whose loony arbitrariness abstracted the world by simply turning it on its head. Generally grouped into the Neo-Expressionist category, his paintings earned a mixed response; to no extent did Mr. Baselitz's work evoke the same respect as the art of his compatriots Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer.

But Americans still have a lot to learn about West German painting and its not-so-distant past. This point was made once with the batch of Mr. Baselitz's small early-60's canvases of pink, oozing feet that formed one of the best moments of the 1987 ''Berlinart'' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. And it is made once again with the artist's 10 ''Hero'' paintings, dating from 1965-66, that form the inaugural show at the Michael Werner Gallery.

Mr. Werner, an art dealer in Cologne, West Germany, is often credited with masterminding the Germanization of American art collectors in the early 80's, a process that continued during the years of his affiliation with the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Whether or not this assessment tells the whole story, Mr. Werner also represented several artists - Mr. Baselitz as well as A. R. Penck and Markus Lupertz -through years when few people wanted to look at, much less buy, their work.

The paintings on view date from the time of Mr. Baselitz's relative obscurity; in fact, the burden and pain of isolation is one of their primary themes, but it is only one. In other ways, these are both hopeful and humorous paintings, full of lush colors and exuberant brushwork.

Each vertical canvas is dominated, nearly filled really, by a big, heavily swathed figure whose swollen body and chunky limbs dwarf a smallish head. These unusually benign Frankenstein monsters in paint suggest defeated German soldiers, and frequently tower over painterly bits of rubble - fallen flags and wheelbarrows and teetering archways. But they are also clearly artists. Paintbrushes protrude from their cumbersome knapsacks; one figure holds a palette. In the painting titled ''Modern Painter,'' the hero sits, his hands held to the earth by traps. (It should also be noted that the hero is sometimes a woman and that the sex of all the figures is actually ambiguous.) These creatures are caught in a kind of comic extremis; their faces look heavenward, but it is not clear if they're about to say ''Ecce Homo'' or start singing ''Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.'' Their bodies, sometimes scarred or marked by stigmata, seem to burst out of their bulky clothing as if they were shedding some unbearable weight or awful responsibility. But their exhaustion - and, more important, the implication of physical transformation - suggests that the battle is over and that a new day is dawning.

To American eyes, Mr. Baselitz's paintings may define a little-known mid-point between Willem de Kooning's ''Women'' paintings of the early 50's and Philip Guston's figurative works of the 70's, which is to say that they convince us first of all through their decorative fierceness. Among their expertly orchestrated palettes, reds and pinks are favored hues; a background may be a pale luminous aqua. Similarly, their improvisational surfaces evince an openness and sweetness that undercuts their intimations of power and manliness.

And above all, these figures are nothing if not clothed in paint, in elaborate disintegrating uniforms of line and gesture. Their wounded bodies and disheveled garments afforded the artist seemingly endless possibilities to experiment with his craft. Their tatters speak foremost of his artistic desires.

Like de Kooning and Guston, the young Baselitz wanted to corral the physicality of abstraction into a new kind of figuration. Too often in the years that followed, he reduced this ambition to formulaic compositions and rote-like surfaces. But in the mid-60's, he was justifiably full of hope.

It's always valuable to be reminded that the modern is nothing new, and that the idea of distilling the figure to its essence is an especially ancient one. So one is grateful for this exhibition of more than 30 idols, heads and vessels made in the third century B.C. on the Greek islands known as the Cyclades.

But Cycladic art, which has long entranced connoisseurs and artists, is now the object of a collecting craze. Perhaps for this reason, the exhibition comes with some unfortunate trappings: dark walls and darker vitrines that do nothing to enhance the viewing of the objects (and whose rounded arches seem more Romanesque than Greek), and a rather badly designed and pretentious catalogue that lingers lovingly over provenances.

These objections voiced, it becomes easier to say that the objects on view are often stunning, at least to the unspecialized eye. It is rare to see so much Cycladic art at one time, to have so many chances to compare and contrast, differentiate and match up. The result is a concentrated lesson in the subtleties of form, in the range of volume, shape and surface and above all expression that is possible within the limits of a narrow and pure style.